War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots
by Ian Morris
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 512 pages, $23
To plug the magazine’s namesake, you discuss in one chapter on the Roman conquests that Cicero was right: That is, if prosperity comes and violent deaths fall, then war is “sometimes good for something,” as you put it. Is your book essentially a validation of Cicero’s observation?
Some think war is hardwired in us or a leftover relic of pre-human days, or a disease of civilization. Either way, the general idea is that war is a pathological thing. If this is right, it raises a question: Why are people still doing this? We would think more peaceful societies would put violent ones out of business. It raises a bigger problem: Why is it every time there’s a major turning point in history that mass violence involved?
So in this sense war is a functional response to humans’ lust for power and riches in the classical realist sense, not a rational or instrumental one, correct?
Like most things, it tends to be a bit of both. For me, a lot of stuff became clearer by [reading] biologists and primatologists. Violence is adaptive. Each species has different way of using violence, but each animal is different from every other. Say you have two lions and one is aggressive and thinks that every problem is solved by attacking and killing. Then that lion is less likely to pass its gene on. But say you have a pacifist lion, then it is also less likely to pass its genes down because it will get shoved aside. Each species evolves toward a kind of equilibrium kind of violence. And humans are exactly the same. But then we are unlike [animals] because we have these gigantic brains that let us evolve culturally as well as biologically. We see that come into play over the last 10,000 years with our rate of decline of violent deaths. Violence led to the creation of governments and the first thing governments want to do is suppress violence among the people they rule.
There seems to be this viewpoint among Cicero and others that Rome was doing their neighbors a favor by conquering them. John Stuart Mill would echo this view several centuries later. Should we assume that all states think they are doing the lord’s work by conquering and bringing civilizations to less noble people? Doesn’t, say, Putin probably think he’s doing Crimea and Ukraine a favor by taking what he sees as Russia’s?
What is innate is humans need certain types of energy or they will die. We need sexual partners. When we are organized into bigger communities – states, empires – then a lot of the same challenges remain. Force has been the way to solve these problems throughout history. I thought Crimea was a good example of a larger story. We evolved to have these chemical responses in our brain. I think what we see is the decision of states going back to the Romans is an intellectualized version of this. Claudius thinks, ‘I can go and invade Britain but there will be price to pay if it goes badly’. He ultimately decides to do this, but the principles are the same.
Each species evolves toward a kind of equilibrium kind of violence. And humans are exactly the same.
How do you account for some of the peaceful rises of states? Isn’t modern state-building as much an economic story as a military one? Does it always require violence?
States haven’t been around forever. Only about 5,000 years; modern ones for about 200 years. The kind of organizations that work most effectively change with their larger environments. For much of human history, those most effective were those that monopolize violence. In our lifetimes we’ve seen a big shift away from nation states toward multistate organizations like the EU and downward toward nonstate actors. MNCs and stock markets are more powerful than states now. The bad news we see is that we tend to wish war out of existence but this never worked. But the good news we see is that we are pretty good at responding to changes in chaos, such as nuclear weapons.
So you don’t dismiss economic theories of war-making or state-building?
In the 18th century, when European conquest creates an intercontinental empire, the volume of trade goes through the roof. It’s no coincidence when Adam Smith grasped this concept that the real wealth of nations comes not from conquest but from government getting out of the market. The nature of power is seeming to change. Markets can only work well when they leave people free. On the other hand, markets can only work if the government uses force to make sure markets work fairly — to punish chieftains and so forth.
You describe some pretty bloody scenes in your book from ancient times, which conjure an image from a Game of Thrones episode. Has the change in nature of warfare in terms of technology — you mention robots in your subtitle, which makes people think of automated drones or cyberwar — made violence less personalized and thus more likely in your opinion?
Improved targeting is one of the big things here. The atom bomb was a solution to a 1940s problem: Being able to level a city in one go. If you miss by 400 yards, it doesn’t matter. Thirty years ago, the Soviets in Afghanistan can either not go after a guy, send in special forces to shoot up his village, or send in planes to carpet bomb the village. Now we have precision weapons that can fly halfway around the world, with a reduction in the size of force blast.
You write that “if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus” (that is, A.D. 96–180). There are some, Steven Pinker and others, who say the same thing about the current era. My guess is you would disagree right?
I agree with Pinker. But the Margaret Mead and Rousseau image of a noble savage doesn’t hold up either. If you look at the bigger story, it’s more complicated yet also simpler than what they are saying. If you look at the long story, instead of seeing the long decline of violent death, overall there’re lots of ups and downs from 1000 BC – the beginning of agriculture, to around 1BC – we see big declines in the rates of death. My impression is that rates of violent deaths fall by three-quarters, from 20 % to 5% or so. By first century AD, rates of violence spike back up. It’s the world of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, much higher rates back up to 10%. By 1400, it comes back down, and eventually to the 0.7% rate of violent death of today.
Today we see a much better relationship between hard and soft power. You see soft power – democracy, commerce, shared human values – have played a major part in lowering violent death. But we also need the ability of the government to punish violently. All these things were going on, that’s when it becomes clear that war drove the creation of bigger and bigger states, which then drives down the rates of violent death. The idea goes back to Thomas Hobbes. Thucydides also hints at this. Once you have a leviathan that sort of scares people, we can all be prosperous. If you’re Hobbes, he’s famously not interested in evidence. Now we have some evidence. We can test Hobbes’ thesis, and he was clearly right about what he was saying.
The lesson I draw from history is when you take away the oversight of the leviathan, you get an increase in violence.
So is the use of violence driven then by social norms or by rational self-interest?
A little bit of both is going on. When we’ve seen very little violence, it was not because the Roman Empire had a vast police force, like, say, the USSR. People do internalize norms of nonviolence and that it’s wrong to settle disputes [with violence] or I will pay this big penalty. Obviously we live in world where that is even truer. But norms are dependent on a leviathan to back them up – the minute that goes away, the norms go out the window. Norms are important but a secondary factor.
If you turn on the evening news, we seem to see nothing but bloodshed. Is part of your thesis that it may be part of the evolutionary process of state-making? That “war made the state and the state made war,” as [Charles] Tilly famously put it? If so, what are the policy prescriptions – to butt out? Or is it your contention that in fact, military solutions are what produce peace? A kind of Darwinian take on the ‘give war a chance’ thesis?
It seems to me history has been clear that war is good for some things. The lesson I draw from history is when you take away the oversight of the leviathan, you get an increase in violence. The best leviathans are ones that are so scary that nobody wants to go there. That’s when you have a well-functioning leviathan. In 1914, very few people wanted a major war to break out. But over the last 30 years, as [the leviathan] loses the ability to intimidate everyone, we get more factions; and maybe states think that striking first is no longer the worst possible scenario. I find it is hard to avoid the conclusion this is happening again, following the news in Iraq right now. The lesson I would take from this sort of thing is we expect it to happen as the international system becomes less straightforward. We suspect the United States is not going to whack everyone.
Finally, a quick methods question: At times you bemoan quantitative data because of it does not go back far enough and we can reach spurious correlations. Other times we hear that anthropologists and archeologists are wrong in their thinking on war. How do we strike a balance as scholars of war in determining larger trends on violence?
I’m very much on the side of quantifiers. If you don’t’ quantify what you’re taking about, you’re wasting everyone’s time. The big challenge is we have these small pieces of history and can go in with a scalpel. But we can’t hope to answer big questions from these small slices; we can’t get enough precision from these vast sweeps of history. We need some way to bring these things together. I think, in principle, there’re lots of reason to be optimistic. We will soon have enough evidence to sketch out proximate rates of violent death from skeleton records being excavated. It’s a good thing that most kinds of lethal traumas leave marks but lots don’t. Starvation and disease in wars will leave nothing distinctive on a skeleton, so there are all kinds of messiness [in the data]. We’ll probably need millions of archeologically skeletons to do this properly;
We’ve gotta take what we’ve got, such as statistical evidence, then put that together with what is basically qualitative evidence and move toward some rough evidence from that. We have literary evidence from Roman authors like Cicero constantly writing about war and giving his impression about what was going on. It’s not obvious how to move from them to numerical evidence. We can we at least sketch out some broad brush-stroke trends. [During] most Stone Age societies, there was a 10%-20% rate of violent death. In the Roman Empire, that fell to 2%-5%. If it was much below that, I would be very surprised. I can guarantee the numbers I put on a table are going to be wrong, but the question is not: Are these numbers right? But how wrong are they? Are they so wrong I completely misjudged the history of war? Or wrong enough within tolerable margin of error? If 10% off, that’s not going to change my estimation. If 20-30%, then that’s uncomfortable.
[This interview was edited and condensed.]
Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist at Stanford, as well as author of Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2010).
